Oilpan4 said:
No one is saying to return to go medieval life or force people to a live an agricultural life like Pol pot did.
It would appear that fossil fuels use needs to be cut in half around the problem pollution areas. Then for 98% of the rest of the country nothing changes. There's no need to roll out a solution that fixes a mega city problem on to small cities and rual areas with no real air quality problems attributable to vehicles burning fuel.
You might want to check the population distribution in this country - the vast majority of the people live in metro areas. Oh, and most of the areas in California with the worst air quality are smaller cities and the rural areas surrounding them, in the San Joaquin Valley (Fresno and Sacramento being exceptions as the 5th and 6th most populous in the state, but Fresno is in the ag heartland) - Bakersfield, Visalia, Hanford/Corcoran. A lot of their pollution comes from ag and truck traffic, plus some from the Ba Area and Sacramento, which are upwind.
Of course, just concentrating on the urban areas won't reduce GHGs.
I went from buying around $200 worth of gasoline per month down to around $40 and an electric vehicle like a 2011 leaf shouldn't even work for me as I'm rural and have absolutely 0 public charging.
Easy. Tax the sinner and subsidize the winner.
If the fed kills the ZEV mandate then California can add a dollar a gallon fuel tax and subsidize ZEVs with that money.
Maybe it won't work.
But we know what doesn't work: 50 years of slowly increasing tail pipe emission regulations.
On the contrary, those regs have given California far better air quality than when I was born, despite the massive increase in population. That it's not as much as I or some others would like based on our personal priorities is true, but then we're not a dictatorship.
You should note that California has the highest gas tax in the U.S., most recently hiked by $0.12/gal. first by the state legislature and then, after the usual suspects put a measure on the ballot to repeal it, the tax hike was confirmed by popular vote. But the willingness and ability of the public to tax themselves is limited, and in this case it was done as a means of catching up with much deferred road maintenance, not for pollution reduction.
In a time of low gas prices I'd be all in favor of raising fuel taxes further, but since many people have suffered a loss of pay that will take years to recover, assuming they even have a job to go back to, do you think there's any likelihood that an extra $1/gal. gas tax has a hope in hell of passing now? Get real.